Here’s your early vote tabulation through Sunday, Day Seven, with five days to go. Here also are the 2009 spreadsheet, the 2007 daily EV report, and the Erik Vidor spreadsheet. Here’s the cumulative summary for the first full week:
Type 2005 2007 2009 2011 ===================================== In Person 24,141 15,792 26,662 19,751 Absentee 2,158 3,555 3,801 4,340 Total 26,299 19,347 30,463 24,091 09 Pct 86.3% 63.5% 100% 79.0%
The first thing you may notice is that the share of the 2009 vote total for this year is up considerably from what I reported for the five day totals. There’s a simple reason for this: I screwed up the arithmetic on Saturday, giving the five day total for this year as 15,689 instead of 18,689. The 2009 vote share should have been 81.4%, so it’s actually down a pinch. Among other things, that means all of the projections I gave on Saturday are off. Here are those numbers again, using the seven day totals. First, the share of the final early vote tally after seven days:
Year 7 Day Ev Total EV 5 Day Pct ====================================== 2005 26,299 78,585 33.5% 2007 19,347 50,264 38.5% 2009 30,463 80,516 37.8% 2011 24,091 63,065 38.2%
The projection for this year’s early vote total is up by 8,000 votes as a result of my screwup. I’m assuming that the rate of early voting will be between that of 2007 and 2009, which is to say I’m assuming that this week, when things traditionally pick up, the early vote totals will not skew too far one way or the other. Obviously, that would affect the final EV total if they do. Now let’s re-run the projections of the ultimate totals based on these updated numbers:
Year Early Total EV Pct ====================================== 2005 81,007 332,154 24.4% 2007 52,476 193,945 27.1% 2009 82,978 257,312 32.1% 2011 65,000 266,393 24.4% 2011 65,000 239,852 27.1% 2011 65,000 202,492 32.1% 2011 65,000 185,185 35.1%
I’ve added a fourth scenario here, for the possibility that we’re seeing a higher rate of early voting this year than in previous years. Again, the higher EV total given here reflects the addition of absentee ballots that arrive after Friday. If we now make the same assumption as before that the city vote share will be between 60 and 70 percent of the Harris County vote share, we get a range of 111,111 to 186,475 votes in the city election from Harris County, which we then bump up to 113,000 to 189,000 after adding in Fort Bend and Montgomery. That makes the high end estimate equivalent to the 2005 city vote total, which was elevated that year by the Double Secret Illegal anti-gay marriage constitutional amendment. I don’t see that happening. The low end is about where it was before, and if we throw out the bottom scenario and assume the rate of early voting will be the same as it was in 2009, that yields a Harris County estimate of 121,495, or about 124,000 overall. Which is to say, much like 2007. I still believe that’s the target total, and I still believe we’re going to come in a little higher than that, say 130,000 to 135,000. All of this may change depending on how heavy or light the early voting is this week. My thanks to Ursula in the comments for pointing out my addition error.